Exhibition | Selections from “OBJECTY” at Tibor de Nagy, New York

NEW YORK CITY — This summer, The Tibor de Nagy Gallery presented OBJECTY (New York City, June 22 – July 29), a group exhibition of twelve contemporary painters and sculptors. Scaling from the intimate tabletop or wall-mounted reliefs to large floor sized assemblages, the sculptures presented a wide array of materials from clay, wood and stone to aqua-resin, polyurethane foam and shoelaces.

The exhibited works toy with the notion of “still life” not so much in a literal sense or as a rethinking of the representation of objects, but more as an abstract and magical reflection of qualities that make up objects. The artists as “object makers” imbue these things with a life of their own, liberating them from the confines of the specifically definable. In the end, they no longer share a relationship to still life in the historical sense as a presentation of wealth or position, but strive to cast light on new verisimilitudes.

With an ego all their own, these works bare an inherent power by way of their materials and dimensionality. The intimate can become large-scale and the dense can become airy as these handmade objects give way to a visual sensibility that is uniquely their own. All these objects share a collaged painterly language that calls into question the definition of objectivity.

Text (edited) and photographs courtesy of the gallery. Cutlines and prices from Artsy.

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